Safety

The vast majority of indigenous people in West Papua
are exceptionally friendly and welcoming, especially when considering
their prolonged historical isolation and disproportionately recent first
exposure to the outside world in general and tourism in particular. It
is of course entirely understandable if occasional reports of local incidents
and associated negative travel warnings discourage potential travelers
to visit Indonesian New Guinea. However, it is also important to place
such incidents and travel warnings into context and perspective because,
despite travel warnings having been in place over much of the past ten
years, we cannot say that our operations have suffered in any way from
the variously postulated threats. This is not to say of course that there
are no risks or threats in West Papua, but that perceived dangers can
relatively straightforwardly be averted through normal precaution and
common sense.

In making assessments on the safety of any given area,
every travel outfit has its own sources of information as well as internal
guidelines and policies against which to judge this information. In addition,
different types of outfits will have different perspectives on security
issues. Registered domestic entities like ourselves, organized after the
laws and regulations of the to be visited country and its regions, and
typically undertaking numerous visits per year to the local destinations
within our portfolio, thereby taking care of all ground arrangements ourselves,
can reasonably be expected to adopt more stringent safety criteria than,
for instance, international tour operators, who typically visit any given
destination only once a year or less, thereby having no legal representation
in the to be visited country but entrusting third parties of variable
legal plumage to make arrangements on their behalf. After all, we are
continuously and directly being exposed to any potential security threats
ourselves. Needless to say of course that we take our personal security
and that of our guests and friends very seriously. We are always well
informed about temporal local conditions and would never operate a tour
if there were any obvious danger. In addition, for us to actively promote
and visit a potentially unsafe destination, the situation needs to be
broadly conducive at the scale at which we operate, essentially allowing
for continuous secure visitation.

It is important to understand and appreciate to the fullest
that all land on New Guinea is considered to be owned by the indigenous
New Guineans, the Papuans, even if their nearest permanent or temporary
settlement is more than twenty kilometers away. Land can be owned communally
by all members of a village community but more commonly is being subdivided
between the various kinship groups that make up a community. Known as
clans or bands, these kinship groups may internally be structured hierarchically,
and further subdivide ownership accordingly between the different families
that make up a clan. Besides customary ownership proper, there are varying
degrees of usage rights granted by landowners to community members more
widely, mostly as a result of intermarriage between clans or other mutually
beneficial exchanges. This leads to the ordinarily complex situation that
any given plot or tract of land can be owned by a group of people, while
at the same time a second group of individuals hold hunting or subsistence
rights that fundamentally restrict the first group's ownership. Thus,
customary land tenure is inherently fluid and unstable because land borders
between tribes, clans and families as well as granted usage rights tend
to be loosely defined and remain closely linked to dynamic social processes.
Unfortunately, tribal land disputes and associated feuds remain common
in West Papua and are the primary cause for safety concerns in the context
of tourism because improperly coordinated visitation of contentious lands
by tourists may exacerbate existing problems or create new ones. Before
trespassing and making use of customary-owned land in Indonesian New Guinea,
even for essentially non-invasive activities like bird-watching or nature
recreation more generally, it is critically important to secure permission
from all stakeholders involved, as part of which a 'usage fee' will normally
have to be paid. Failure to secure such prior permission may have very
serious consequences, because native New Guineans generally resent unsolicited
trespassing by outsiders, exercise strong control over land and resources,
and readily will impose huge fines to any intercepted trespassers. In
addition, many tribesmen in New Guinea still consider the use of (potentially
lethal) force to be an entirely acceptable way to solve simple problems.

At Papua Expeditions we are intimately familiar with
the many peculiarities of social organization and associated land tenure
in West Papua, and each and every destination that we promote here has
been carefully selected on the basis of an entire suite of environmental
as well as socio-economic criteria, the latter including community receptiveness.
At each destination, we initially spent multiple weeks to several months
in order to seek out the most pristine and rewarding sites and itineraries,
thereby forging intimate ties with customary landowners, village elders
and authorities, and community and clan leaders, but over time, all our
activities on ancestral lands controlled by indigenous communities have
been formally regulated through a Memory of Understanding or more legally
binding agreement. Such agreements imply a varying degree of coordinated
micro-management based on the outcome of a prolonged deliberation process
with customary landowners, village elders and authorities, as well as
broad segments of the community. These agreements are further subject
to annual or bi-annual review and have thus been perfected over the course
of years, providing the best possible basis for continuous visitation.
After all, good agreements do make good friends.

Finally, when we take you off the beaten track, to pristine
hotspots we know inside out, we do take all reasonable precautions to
maximize your safety and comfort under all circumstances. We carry a Garmin®
Global Positioning System (GPS) and Thuraya® Satellite Phone at all
times, enabling us to respond adequately in the event of any emergency.
In addition, we have concluded pre-arrangements with helicopter charter
companies based in West Papua as part of our foresight to develop comprehensive
emergency evacuation procedures and protocols for the various destinations
that we promote throughout the territory.